28 July 2016

Welcome to the White nationalist Republican party

After Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last week, Nicolle Wallace, a longtime GOP strategist, had a memorable exchange with NBC’s Chuck Todd.

WALLACE: [T]he Republican Party that I worked for for two decades died in this room tonight. We are now represented as a Party by a man who believes in protectionism, isolationism, and nativism. And those were the forces that George W. Bush, and I believe John McCain too, were most worried about during their times as the leaders of the Republican Party.

CHUCK TODD: Striking comment. You believe the party died tonight?

WALLACE: Well, the voters picked this guy. This is where the Republican Party is now. They now are attracted to those forces of isolationism and protectionism. But the party I was part of for two decades is dead.

If you feel as if you’ve run into that sentiment and that phrasing quite a bit lately, it’s not your imagination. The headline of David Brooks’ New York Times column last week read, “The Death of the Republican Party.” Max Boot recently published an L.A. Times piece with the headline, “The Republican Party is dead.” The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson, George W. Bush’s former chief speechwriter, wrote last month that the Party of Lincoln “is dying.”

After the GOP’s presidential nominating process wrapped up in May, the New York Daily News ran a cover with a cartoon elephant in a casket. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the GOP, a once-great political party, killed by epidemic of Trump,” the cover told readers.

It’s important to define our terms a bit, because it’s easy to misunderstand what these observers mean by “dead.” The Republican Party will, of course, continue to exist no matter what happens in the 2016 elections. When commentators refer to the GOP’s “death,” they’re not talking about its disappearance from the political landscape.

Rather, this is about the passing of a major party as we understand it, giving way to something new. The Republican Party, as an institutional entity, isn’t going anywhere, but it’s nevertheless transforming into something different from what Americans have been accustomed to.

Avik Roy, a Republican health care wonk with whom I’ve disagreed many, many times, has been deeply involved in GOP politics for many years. He spoke to Vox yesterday about the state of his party and the degree to which, as Vox put it, Republicans are “driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans.”

“I think the conservative movement is fundamentally broken,” Roy tells me. “Trump is not a random act. This election is not a random act.” […]

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism – philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

In the same interview, he added, “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true – which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

New York’s Jon Chait made a related point last week, reflecting on the GOP convention, explaining Trump’s rise as part of the Republican Party’s transition from a conservative party into an explicitly ethno-nationalistic, “white-identity-politics” party.

Clare Malone recently argued something similar at FiveThirtyEight, explaining the degree to which the GOP’s small-government ethos has been completely replaced by the politics of “racial and cultural resentment.”

When Republicans talk about the death of their party, I think this is ultimately what they’re referring to. Sure, some of these trends and ideas have been part of the GOP’s diaspora for years, but what’s new – what marks the death of one party and the birth of another – is the way in which Republicans in 2016 have come to define themselves, not by principles of equal opportunity and the free market, but by the ethno-nationalistic tenets the party has traditionally tried to suppress.

Parrhesia

The two all-time most popular posts of Transudationism

A modern-day classic

All life is a form of light, and the cosmos is a holonic Holy Hologram.

Immanence ≋ Transcendence

Transudationism: mankinds' cosmic ideology.

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

Ascensional Transudation

Cosmic Evolution

All history is the history of the evolutionary transubstantiation of matter to Spirit via biological-life processes of Blood and Reason.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's concluding thoughts from his 1978 Harvard address, A World Split Apart

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's concluding thoughts from his famous 1978 Harvard address,"A World Split Apart":

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but - upward.

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Neoconservatives used 9/11 to launch their plan for US world hegemony. Their plan fit with the interests of America’s ruling oligarchies. Wars are good for the profits of the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in vain a half century ago. American hegemony is good for the oil industry’s control over resources and resource flows. The transformation of the Middle East into a vast American puppet state serves well the Israel Lobby’s Zionist aspirations for Israeli territorial expansion.

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"The seed of the universe is the big bang, says Kyle McDermott in 'The Declaration of White Independence: The Founding Documents of Transudationism'. An explanation of this view which holds that all of current humanity and life on Earth today was intentionally set in motion all those billions of years ago, 'The Declaration of White Independence' probes matters of cosmological significance with straightforward candor and accessibility. Featuring intriguing concepts and ideas, 'The Declaration of White Independence' is highly recommended for metaphysical studies shelves."

The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes

and speaking of cosmic symphonies, Julianne Hough

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